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George Eliot and the Sequel Question*

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George Eliot and the Sequel Question* George Eliot and the Sequel Question* John M. Picker One of the shop-windows he paused before was that of a second-hand book-shop, where, on a narrow table outside, the literature of the ages was represented in judicious mixture, from the im- mortal verse of Homer to the mortal prose of the railway novel. That the mixture was judicious was apparent from Deronda’s finding in it something that he wanted—namely, that wonderful bit of autobiography, the life of the Polish Jew, Salomon Maimon; which, as he could easily slip it into his pocket, he took from its place, and entered the shop to pay for, expecting to see behind the coun- ter a grimy personage showing that nonchalance about sales which seems to belong universally to the second-hand book-business. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda1 “ s for the bad part of Daniel Deronda, there is nothing to do but cut it away—”: F. R. Leavis’s often-cited dismissal of the A “bad part”—the “weakness” of which, he writes, “is represented by Deronda himself, and by what may be called in general the Zionist inspiration”—of George Eliot’s final novel at first seems to typify the kind of authoritative critical voice on display throughout his 1948 classic The Great Tradition.2 So does his accompanying desire to excise the “bad part” and rechristen the remainder Gwendolen Harleth. Yet, as other scholars have noted, Leavis’s is only the most severe expression of a response that dates back to the time of the first appearance of the novel.3 In October 1876, just a month after the eighth and final number of Daniel Deronda was put on the market, Eliot wrote to a friend that praise of the novel sent her from Christian as well as Jewish readers, including Chaim Guedallia, a leader of Anglo-Jewry who had extracted scenes from it for publication in the London Jewish Chronicle, “is better than the laudation of readers who cut the book into scraps and talk of nothing in it but Gwendolen. I meant everything in the book to be related to everything else there.”4 * This essay is dedicated to the memory of my father, Martin Picker (1929–2005). New Literary History, 2006, 37: 361–388 362 new literary history In my epigraph, the contents of the bookshop table characterize the breadth of Eliot’s own book. On the table, the “immortal verse” of the Homeric epic sits in “judicious mixture” beside the “mortal prose” of railway reading, and Daniel finds the book that will lead him not to a “grimy personage” but to Mordecai, the prophetic figure who in turn will lead Daniel to embrace a Jewish identity. In her novel, Eliot con- structs a bourgeois epic of national origins begun in medias res, but in the process, as readers long have recognized, borrows essential elements from the sensation novels that late Victorians increasingly read in cheap yellowback editions on the train. Daniel Deronda is where the “immortal” and “mortal” are meant to coexist in “judicious mixture,” even as Daniel, as if to anticipate the reaction to the novel by those such as Guedallia, finds in the “judicious mixture” of the used books that “something that he wanted,” the story of an eminent Jew. Eliot’s echo of “Judaism” in the repeated “judicious” furthers the analogy of the novel itself to a kind of bookshop, with covers housing an inventory in which “everything” is “to be related to everything else there,” and where, for Daniel and Gwendolen as well as revelation-hungry readers, unexpected finds—the discovery of Daniel’s origins and the consequences of Gwendolen’s marital choice, to name two—await. The ignoble tradition of reader rejection of the “bad part” is conveyed by both Eliot and Leavis in terms of the destructive material act of cut- ting. While it may be reasonable to assume that Eliot’s reference to the “readers who cut the book into scraps” is hyperbolic, Leavis, as Claudia Johnson has shown, went to odd, even embarrassing lengths to realize his own editorial fantasy, in a version of the novel abridged by thirty-four chapters that he intended to publish in the 1970s under his preferred title of Gwendolen Harleth, now “liberated from” Daniel Deronda, with an in- troduction subtitled “Why the Surgery Was Necessary.”5 Johnson suggests that Leavis was motivated to cut the book by a desire to recast Eliot’s novel as one that respects rather than rejects “Englishness” and that affirms rather than “unsettles” what Leavis saw as “the specifically English founda- tions of the novel as a genre” (215, 214). Leavis described his procedure as “freeing by simple surgery the living part of the immense Victorian novel from the deadweight of utterly different matter that George Eliot thought fit to make it carry,” and Johnson calls it an “amputation,” but his attempt to extract along gender lines might as readily be called a castration, or, in the religious discourse of the novel, a circumcision, a term that takes on greater significance if we accept Johnson’s point that Leavis sought to make Gwendolen out to be the “real Jew in the first place, the godly, goodly Hebrew languishing in bondage to the Pharaoh, Daniel Deronda.”6 Leavis’s as well as the earliest readers’ “surgeries” represent attempts to circumcise a novel that notoriously evades, as contemporary george eliot and the sequel question 363 critical debate has not, the entire question of whether or not its pro- tagonist underwent circumcision.7 Whatever metaphor one chooses, the process of cutting enacts on the pages of the novel perhaps the most literal kind of applied criticism, reducing the “judicious mixture,” at one extreme, to a loose selection of bits and scraps. Put another way, this is a novel that to an unusual degree not only has elicited, but also would appear to anticipate, the material dismemberment it has undergone in the hands of readers and critics. While, from the first, many Jewish and Christian readers alike have endorsed performing some kind of reductive surgery on Daniel Deronda, there is another related, though largely forgotten, line of response to Eliot’s novel that cuts in somewhat different ways. By this I mean the appearance, in the immediate wake of the publication of Deronda, of two sequels by other hands, a shorter satire and a full-blown novel. Gillian Beer has argued that Deronda is a novel “haunted by the future,” one (or more than one) ultimately and deliberately left unwritten by Eliot.8 The sequels manifest that future. They attempt to impose closure on a novel that goes out of its way to resist it—and in so doing, one might add, gives the sequel its raison d’être by begging the question, what happened next? The ethos of the sequel as a genre typically is one of cooperation and integration with the earlier work. The sequel usually represents a means to honor the power of the original and an attempt to recapture and further extend that power. But with Eliot, and especially with Deronda, the sequel is a reproach. In aesthetic and ideological ways, the sequels and related “variations” on Deronda offer critical attacks on Eliot’s plot, structure, and characters, but especially her treatment of the Jewish Ques- tion. I will say more about this below, but for now, I suggest that these continuations are significant not only for their content, offering as they do reactionary responses to Eliot’s controversial book, but also for their printed forms. In these sequels, content and form are, if not inseparable, then at least equally vital to the workings of the critique of Deronda. The book historian D. F. McKenzie, in seeking to expand the definition of “bibliography,” speaks to this point: “If we are accurately to reconstruct our literary past, we cannot be indifferent to the details of book form, in the contribution design makes to meaning, in mediating authorial intention and directing the responses of readers.”9 Following McKenzie’s lead, in this essay I place value on the material status of texts “to show that forms effect meaning” and that the book is indeed “an expressive form.”10 I argue that Eliot’s realist vision, her Jewish sympathies, as well as her resistance to conventional closure prompt unauthorized sequels, secondhand books of a different sort, into a relationship with their predecessor that is more critical than celebratory. Emerging alongside an analytical tradition of desires for “simple surgery” upon the object 364 new literary history of scrutiny, these secondhand books cut their literary forebear a glance that mocks Eliot’s tolerance and underscores the status and identity of her novel and corpus as material objects. These sequels in turn provide a new opportunity to understand the unique position and implicit legacy of Deronda within modernity. The attention that the sequel phenomenon has received in literary criticism has tended to focus on the idea or ideology of the sequel rather than its material embodiment. Gérard Genette, in distinguishing be- tween the “autographic” and the “allographic” continuation, the former referring to the work prolonged by the author and the latter the work written by another due to the author’s death or “some other cause of final abandonment,” provides a convenient way to categorize sequels.11 Similarly useful is Terry Castle’s definition of “charismatic texts,” by which she means “those with an unusually powerful effect on a large reading public” that lead readers to want “more of the same.”12 Discuss- ing eighteenth-century sequels such as those to Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, Castle ascribes psychological significance to the sequel, whose readers “are motivated by a deep unconscious nostalgia for a past reading pleasure, the original story of dream and fulfillment” and a “subliminal desire for repetition” (134).
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